Timaeus — Plato

is the lover of God/ and the words of the Book of Exodus in which God reveals himself to Moses (Exod. iii. 14). He dwells at length on miracles performed in his own day, of which the evidence is regarded by him as irresistible. He speaks in a very interesting manner of the beauty and utility of nature and of the human frame, which he conceives to afford a foretaste of*the heavenly state and of the resurrection of the body.

The book is not really what to most persons the title of it would imply, and belongs to an age which has passed away. But it contains many fine passages and thoughts which are for all time. The short treatise de Monarchia of Dante is by far the most remarkable of mediaeval ideals, and bears the impress of the great genius in whom Italy and the Middle Ages are so vividly reflected.

It is the vision of an Universal Empire, which is supposed to be the natural and necessary government of the world, having a divine authority distinct from the Papacy, yet coextensive with it. It is not * the ghost of the dead Roman Empire sitting crowned upon the grave thereof,' but the legitimate heir and successor of it, justified by the ancient virtues of the Romans and the beneficence of their rule.

Their right to be the governors of the world is also confirmed by the testimony of miracles, and acknowledged by St. Paul when he appealed to Caesar, and even more emphatically by Christ Himself, Who could not have made atonement for the sins of men if He had not been condemned by a divinely authorized tribunal.

The necessity for the establishment of an Universal Empire is proved partly by a priori arguments such as the unity of God and the unity of the family or nation ; partly by perversions of Scripture and history, by false analogies of nature, by misapplied quotations from the classics, and by odd scraps and commonplaces of logic, showing a familiar but by no means exact knowledge of Aristotle (of Plato there is none).

But a more convincing argument still is the miserable state of the world, which he touchingly describes. He sees no hope of happiness or peace for mankind until all nations of the earth are comprehended in a single empire. The whole treatise shows how deeply the idea of the Roman Empire was fixed in the minds of his contemporaries. Not much argument was needed to maintain the truth of a theory which to his own 2contemporaries seemed so natural and congenial. He speaks, Republic. or rather preaches, from the point of view, not of the ecclesiastic, Introducbut of the layman, although, as a good Catholic, he is willing ^'°'^' to acknowledge that in certain respects the Empire must submit to the Church.

The beginning and end of all his noble reflections and of his arguments, good and bad, is the aspiration, 'that in this little plot of earth belonging to mortal man life may pass in freedom and peace. So inextricably is his vision of the future bound up with the beliefs and circumstances of his own age. The 'Utopia' of Sir Thomas More is a surprising monument of his genius, and shows a reach of thought far beyond his contemporaries.

The book was written by him at the age of about 34 or 35, and is full of the generous sentiments of youth. He brings the light of Plato to bear upon the miserable state of his own country. Living not long after the Wars of the Roses, and in the dregs of the Catholic Church in England, he is indignant at the corruption of the clergy, at the luxury of the nobility and gentry, at the sufferings of the poor, at the calamities caused by war.

To the eye of More the whole world was in dissolution and decay ; and side by side with the misery and oppression which he has described in the First Book of the Utopia, he places in the Second Book the ideal state which by the help of Plato he had constructed. The times were full of stir and intellectual interest. The distant murmur of the Reformation was beginning to be heard.

To minds like More's, Greek literature was a revelation : there had arisen an art of interpretation, and the New Testament was beginning to be understood as it had never been before, and has not often been since, in its natural sense.

The life there depicted appeared to him wholly unlike that of Christian commonwealths, in which ' he saw nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the Commonwealth. He thought that Christ, like Plato, ' instituted all things common,' for which reason, he tells us, the citizens of Utopia were the more willing to receive his doctrines^. The community of